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Today we are shutdown while Chris installs a new boiler. Our old boiler was old.. it was from 1964! Here at Millstream we don’t expect to have state-of-the-art stuff, but its nice if it was made in our lifetime. Our New boiler was made in 2000… thats pretty much new to us. It came from near Sigourney, Iowa, where they were using it to make wood pulp or something. It will be much more efficient and hopefully save us lots of money on our gas bill. It also will be more reliable, the old boiler kept breaking down on us.. usually late at night when I was brewing and the only one here! In fact, most of our equipment failures seem to happen when i’m the only one here… and late at night.. hmmm.

Our lager yeast has been acting up on us lately, and giving me quite a headache. I finally just dumped it this week, and ordered new yeast. We keep our yeast (yes its our private strain) banked off site incase we ever have a problem. I don’t know what exactly happened, but our lager beers started to attenuate farther, and they have an estery profile that is out of place. Its possible they mutated or perhaps were invaded by wild strain. Since we don’t make lambics around here, I decided to dump our yeast. Since the boiler is down, its not a big deal, we can’t brew anyway.

All this led to another innovation. I was so unhappy with the lager yeast, and we needed to make our wheat beer. I just had a Pale ale finish out nicely… and I thought, well why not! I pitched our Ale yeast into our Wheat Lager and walla we now have a Wheat Ale! Its just like the old wheat beer, but with nutty, fruity finish. Also, since its an ale, the beer was done in just a few days. I think this may help solve some of our bottlenecks in the lager cellar. It will also help to keep the Ale yeast going inbetween batches of Pail Ale. Don’t worry, the Schild Brau and other lager beers will always be lagers.. We have always felt that our wheat beer has been ‘missing’ something.. I think this was it. We still have a lager batch of wheat out there, so I don’t expect this batch to be packaged for a couple of weeks, but when it does I’d love to hear what you think!

One more thing, our New Black Cherry Soda is in the Tank, and should be released at Maifest.

Boiler Pictures

I just arrived!

Old guy on the left, New guy on the right